48 posts categorized "Global Health"

December 09, 2015

In No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy, Linsey McGoey, senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex, excoriates what she sees as the historical illiteracy of many of today's philanthropists. Armed with good intentions, wealth, and (as they would have you believe) inerrant business acumen, the new breed of "philanthrocapitalist" applies terms like impact, theory of change, and social entrepreneurship to their philanthropic activities and are intently concerned with generating "shared value." In reality, however, these "TED heads" (as McGoey calls them) are simply following in the footsteps of their philanthropic predecessors.

Indeed, the main difference between the new breed of philanthropist and their robber-baron forerunners is rhetoric, argues McGoey. Like their modern progeny, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford each earned their fortunes through anti-competitive practices, aggressive lobbying for favorable legal treatment, and risky financial engineering; each used his philanthropic benevolence as public cover for the ethically dubious (and often illegal) means used to amass his wealth; and each claimed his business acumen made him a better custodian of the public good than government or traditional charity. Or, as Carnegie famously put it: "[T]he millionaire will be a trustee of the poor, intrusted [sic] for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself."

McGoey will have none of it. The billionaire-knows-best style of philanthropy is as paternalistic as it is ineffective, she argues, and the simple truth of that observation is as lost on today's philanthropists as it was on Carnegie and Rockefeller. The typical philanthrocapitalist insists, for example, that philanthropy has, until now, been ineffectual — a claim made without any acknowledgment of the difficulty inherent in measuring social impact, or that the actual influence of any one foundation’s grantmaking on a social problem is nearly impossible to isolate. One case is particularly instructive for McGoey: former President Bill Clinton has said in the past that microfinance is responsible for lifting more than a hundred million people out of poverty. But while it's true that more than a hundred million people have received a microcredit loan, she writes, most studies indicate that even for "successful" microfinance programs, insufficient evidence exists to demonstrate a link between their activities and poverty alleviation. Moreover, the few studies that were able to demonstrate a statistically significant link showed only very modest increases in the income of loan recipients, while several studies have found that the high interest rates attached to such loans — and favored by microfinance investors — often exacerbate rather than alleviate poverty among loan recipients. Investors, on the other hand, have seen consistently positive returns on their investments; little surprise, then, that microfinance advocates are adamant in their opposition to interest-rate caps and other regulations that would stifle the “success” of microlending.

McGoey herself further argues that today's TED heads are different from their more modest progenitors in the way they shamelessly leverage their charitable donations to advance private economic interests. Whether it's a wealthy mining magnate using a generous donation to the Clinton Global Initiative to earn himself an introduction to the foreign minister of a resource-rich developing nation, or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supporting agricultural initiatives in Africa and South America to increase the economic influence of U.S. agribusinesses, she details how modern philanthrocapitalists consistently blur the line between charity and business. While there may be nothing legally wrong with using charitable largess to reap financial rewards, for McGoey such practices raise important ethical questions about the use of philanthropy to advance a corporation's (or nation's) economic interests.

August 16, 2015

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content from and about the social sector, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Data

In the first Q&A for their new Community Insights series, the folks at Markets for Good speak with Andrew Means, co-founder of the Impact Lab and founder of Data Analysts for Social Good.

Giving

Good post by Beth Kanter on six fundraising platforms that have disrupted charitable giving forever.

In a review of Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference, Nonprofit Chronicles blogger Marc Gunthersays that if "Effective Altruism catches on more widely – and that's a big if – it will disrupt traditional philanthropy, change the way individuals donate to charity and force nonprofits to get much better at measuring impact...."

Global Health

Think the world is getting worse? Max Roser and the folks at OurWorldinData.org have a dozen or so charts and tables that suggest otherwise.

The continent of Africa recently celebrated a year without a single recorded case of polio. On Slate, the Gates Foundation's Jay Wenger explains why that is cause for optimism but not complacency.

Governance

In an op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Sonya Campion, a trustee of the Seattle-based Campion Foundation, argues that advocacy is a basic responsibility of all nonprofit boards.

Nonprofits

On the Social Velocity blog, the Packard Foundation's Kathy Reich, who usually doesn't agree with those who urge nonprofits to act more like for-profits, says there is one area where nonprofits lag their for-profit peers: talent assessment, development, and management.

July 26, 2015

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Criminal Justice

The people who credit mass incarceration for reducing crime in the United States have it all wrong, writes Allison Schrager in Quartz.

Democracy

In advance of National Voter Registration Day on September 22, Independent Sector, the National Council of Nonprofits, Nonprofit VOTE, and United Way Worldwide have launched Nonprofit Votes Count, a national campaign aimed at encouraging every eligible nonprofit staff member and volunteer to register and vote.

Disabilities

Sunday is the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the ADA National Network and its ten regional centers have out together a nice tool kit to mark the occasion.

June 26, 2015

Don't be fooled by the title of Kentaro Toyama's Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology: this is not an iconoclastic anti-technology manifesto. Nor is it a paean to an idealized pre-digital age when social change was driven by "people in the street." Instead, as back-cover blurbs from both Bill Gates and William Easterly, the NYU economics professor whose book The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor excoriated the kind of "technocratic" global health interventions favored by the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Geek Heresy presents a nuanced argument for a human-centric approach to development work that leverages, rather than relies on, technology to create change.

A "recovering technoholic," Toyama, co-founder of Microsoft Research India and now the W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan, once believed fervently in the power of technology to solve a range of "social afflictions." Like many of his peers in the tech industry, he embraced the idea that digital technology and cleverly designed devices could improve failing schools, eliminate health disparities, and lift communities out of poverty. But his work in India and elsewhere soon disabused him of that notion, convincing him, instead, that technology's role in society, not to mention its many grave consequences, was widely misunderstood. He couldn't ignore the fact, for instance, that Microsoft Research India's pilot projects, though successful in well-funded, closely monitored demonstration schools, faltered when scaled to underfunded government schools — in part due to the lack of adequately trained teachers, engaged administrators, and tech support and infrastructure. In those situations, technology not only didn't improve things; it exacerbated existing problems and disadvantages.

This "Law of Amplification" is the crux of Toyama's argument. "[T]echnology"s primary effect," he writes, "is to amplify human forces...[and] magnify existing social forces" — another way of saying "the degree to which technology makes an impact depends on existing human capacities." While it isn't a novel idea, as the author himself admits, Toyama sees it as a useful framework for a discussion of how NGOs, development experts, and industry leaders can leverage technology more effectively to address poverty, educational disparities, and other development challenges.

June 24, 2015

Jadi Begum Bi lives in a small mud house near Sargodha, Pakistan. She may never meet Shakil Khan, a member of a displaced community near Syedpur, Bangladesh, or Raju Sharma, a laborer in Patna, India. They all have one thing in common, though: they had been blind for years, until their eyesight was restored and their lives transformed as part of RS Foundation's ocular procedures program.

According to the World Health Organization, 60 percent of the estimated half a million children who go blind every year in developing countries will die in childhood. WHO further notes that restoring sight is the single most cost-effective health intervention in reducing global poverty. For the cost of dinner at an inexpensive restaurant, a poor, visually impaired individual can have their sight restored, regain the ability to work and provide for their family, and recover their lost dignity. Indeed, studies have found that eye surgery interventions in developing Asian and African countries "significantly increase personal consumption expenditure (PCE) among operated cases" and raise "productivity among vulnerable groups, in particular females, [the] elderly and those with the [least] economic opportunity."

March 29, 2015

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Collaboration

On the Rockefeller Foundation blog, Zia Khan, the foundation's vice president for initiatives and strategy, shares four "counter-intuitive lessons" about cross-sector collaboration.

Data

On the Markets for Good blog, Bill Anderson, technical lead for the Secretariat of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), examines the potential for a people-based data revolution across Africa.

Education

50CAN, a network of local education advocates "learning from and supporting each other," has launched a new blog called The Catalyst to help local education leaders develop policy goals, craft their advocacy plans, and secure lasting change.

On the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation blog, Cari Schneider, director of research and policy for Getting Smart, suggests that one of the least appreciated barriers to effective education reform is definitional in nature.

March 05, 2015

David Barash, an emergency room physician, joined the GE family in 2010 as chief medical officer of the Life Care Solutions business, a division of GE Healthcare known for its technological innovation, and moved to the GE Foundation, which he serves as the chief medical officer and executive director of the health portfolio, in 2013.

Philanthropy News Digest: Over the past few years, the GE Foundation has earmarked a significant portion of its resources for Africa, with a focus on children and mothers. How did that programmatic focus come about?

David Barash: We started thinking about what we could do programmatically in Africa about ten years ago. Initially, the Africa Project was limited to in-kind donations of equipment. We soon realized, however, that simply donating equipment is a flawed strategy if you don't have people on the ground who can use and maintain that equipment. So we re-evaluated what we were doing and determined that our goals were really to help drive capacity building and strengthening public health systems in the region.

With that in mind, the two pillars of our grantmaking in Africa today are Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5, Reducing Child Mortality and Improving Maternal Health, and Safe Surgery in low resource settings — seeing what can we do to help provide safe surgical environments, primarily for pregnant mothers, but also for accident and trauma victims.

GE is known for is its lean Six Sigma approach and change acceleration process, what we call our CAP program. In working with health clinics here in the United States, for example, our teams are invited in to work with the clinic leaders, look at what is needed, ask clinic staff what they need, and provide the type of training GE leaders and executives get. In most cases, it's about the change process: here's what you can change, here's how we would suggest doing it, here are the things you need to look out for. We work alongside clinical staff to help them get where they want to go.

We use the same principles in sub-Saharan Africa, where hundreds of women die every day as a result of complications from pregnancy. A lot of those mothers are dying because there is limited access to safe anesthesia, which reduces the availability and increases the risk of C-section. One of our communities is Kisumu, in western Kenya, which before we got there had no anesthesiologists for a population of five hundred thousand people. We saw that and thought, "What if we can offer a simple intervention? What if we train nurses to deliver anesthesia independently of a physician or anesthesiologist?" If we trained X number of nurses, they could handle Y number of cases a day. Of course, there are other issues: you need to have operating rooms, you need to have clean water, oxygen — some of which we're delivering. But right now, without anesthesia, women are dying.

We had heard about Dr. Mark Newton, a physician from the U.S. who has been working at Kijabe Hospital, north of Nairobi, for fifteen years, training nurses to be nurse-anesthetists. He's been very successful and has been able to deliver extraordinary services and safe surgery in a very resource-poor setting. In a partnership with the Kenyan Ministry of Health, Dr. Newton and Kijabe Hospital, our local partner the Center for Public Health and Development, Assist International, and Vanderbilt University, we have established a robust program to train forty nurse anesthetists for Kisumu County.

PND: Jumping to the other side of the continent, the foundation provided $2 million to Partners In Health to address needs related to the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Had you been active in West Africa prior to the outbreak?

DB: We have a significant presence in Nigeria and some in Ghana, but we have limited programs in the three countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak. However, as the news from the region grew dire, we started thinking about what we might do, and I asked our board to look carefully at the potential impact Ebola could have — not just on Africa, but on the global economy. Quite frankly, looking at what we could do to help those underresourced countries was the right thing to do and led directly to our commitment to Partners In Health.

We also looked at other ways we could help. For example, we established what we call the Ebola Business Response Team, which is looking at how GE businesses can have impact beyond just the cash contribution we’re making to Partners In Health. GE Healthcare is looking at what equipment might be useful, not only in the response to the current outbreak but in terms of strengthening public health infrastructure in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. And we're talking to GE Water about some of the filtration systems they make and what we might be able do to strengthen water systems and infrastructure in all three countries, as well as GE Power and our healthcare software and global software businesses.

March 01, 2015

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Data

On Medium, Dan Gillmor, the long-time technology writer for the San Jose Mercury News,argues that governments and powerful tech companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft are creating "choke points" on the Internet and "using those choke points to destroy our privacy, limit our freedom of expression, and lock down culture and commerce. Too often," Gillmor adds, "we give them our permission — trading liberty for convenience — but a lot of this is being done without our knowledge, much less permission...."

Education

In an op-ed for the Minn Post, progressive activist and education blogger Lynnell Mickelsen suggests that Minneapolis could change its schools to work better for kids of color, but it "would involve asking mostly white middle-classadministrators, teachers and employees to change their work lives — i.e. their schedules, assignments, job locations and even pay — around the needs, comfort and convenience of low-income people of color and their children." Be sure to check out the comments thread.

Giving

Pamela Yip, a business columnist for the Dallas Morning News, reports on a recent presentation by Sharna Goldseker, managing director of 21/64, a New York consulting firm, in which Goldseker touched on several factors that distinguish younger donors from their parents and grandparents.

Global Health

In a podcast on the Humanosphere blog, Gilles van Cutsem, a physician and medical director for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, says the Ebola crisis in West Africa is far from over.

Higher Education

As this well-thought-out data visualization from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shows, America’s postsecondary student population is more diverse than ever.

February 10, 2015

A recent survey conducted by World Vision found that, despite the growing list of humanitarian crises around the world, 80 percent of Americans did not plan to increase their charitable giving in 2014. Discouraging perhaps, but not surprising. Those without the means to fund large-scale interventions tend to feel helpless in the face of widespread suffering, with many believing that a modest donation cannot possibly make a difference in addressing seemingly intractable problems, while others worry that little of their money will ever reach the intended beneficiaries.

In their new book, A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, award-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife, former journalist-turned-investment banker Sheryl WuDunn, beg to differ: You can make a difference. But to do so, you have to be thoughtful and intentional in your approach. That means: 1) doing research to ensure that your gift benefits the target population; 2) volunteering your time and expertise when possible; and 3) engaging in advocacy.

The authors, whose 2009 book Half the Skyexamined ways to expand opportunity for women and girls in the developing world, here broaden their canvas to include efforts to expand opportunity for all marginalized populations, in the U.S. as well as abroad, with a particular focus on poverty alleviation. It's a formidable challenge, and Kristof and WuDunn do their best to make it comprehensible by breaking it down into parts: how effective interventions can make a lasting impact; how nonprofit organizations can maximize both their income and impact; how giving can benefit the giver.

According to Kristof and WuDunn, these days individual donors can be more confident about the effectiveness of their donations, for a number of reasons: anti-poverty interventions and development projects have become more evidence-based and cost-efficient in recent years; the Web makes it easier for donors to learn about the impact of their giving; and, increasingly, development projects are run more transparently and with greater buy-in and expertise from local communities. Indeed, the book, as much as anything, is a compilation of admiring portraits of nonprofit practitioners, social entrepreneurs, and activists working to remove barriers to opportunity. At the same time, it emphasizes the importance of (and increasing use of) rigorous randomized controlled trials to ensure that interventions are evidence-based and effective. And in highlighting organizations such as Evidence Action, MDRC, and the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, organizations that do the un-sexy but essential work of research and evaluation, it aims to empower individuals to think critically about the programs and charities they choose to support.

January 25, 2015

Our weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Climate Change

How concerned are global CEOs about climate change? Apparently, not much. According to an article in The Guardian, an annual survey of global CEOs by professional services group PricewaterhouseCoopers didn't include a single question about climate change, after only 10 percent of CEOs registered concern about the issue in the previous year's survey.

Communications/Marketing

On her Getting Attention! blog, Nancy Schwartz shares a four-step process designed to close the marketing-fundraising divide in your organization.

Data

In Philanthropy Daily, Georgetown University graduate student Alexander Podkul updates readers on a U.S. District Court hearing earlier this month regarding access to public data contained in the annual tax form nonprofits file with the IRS. "The issue up for debate," writes Podkul, "is that [Public.Resource.Org founder Carl] Malamud has requested Form 990 data in a modernized electronic file (or other machine-readable format) but has only received the raw data in image format....Although th[e] issue appears to be...specific to Malamud and his organization," adds Podkul,

a ruling in favor of Public.Resource would greatly affect many who participate in and study the nonprofit sector. In September 2013, for example, the Aspen Institute's Philanthropy & Social Innovation released the second edition of their report "Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data," which focused exclusively on the importance of this very issue. Their argument in favor of opening electronic data, i.e., making it "truly open," is threefold: open data would 1) make it easier for authorities to detect fraud, 2) "spur innovation in the nonprofit sector," and 3) help make more sense of 990 data....

Global Health

Nice post by Ned Breslin detailing some of the ways mobile apps are being used to combat the Ebola virus.

January 10, 2015

In December, TIME magazine named Ebola Fighters — doctors, nurses, caregivers, scientists, and medical directors "who answered the call," often putting their own lives on the line — as its "Person of the Year." We couldn't agree more: local West Africans and long-time residents like our friend and partner Katie Meyler and her colleague Iris are courageous, vital, and worthy of support.

While much of the emergency funding from private donors and companies has been channeled to U.S. government partnerships and programs, we've been focused on helping donors reach the "last mile" with their donations. Aaron Debah is familiar with that last mile. Aaron, a Liberian nurse, has rallied his neighbors to go house-to-house to combat rumors and misinformation in a culturally relevant way. He's also producing a local radio show about Ebola to spread the message more widely in the community. Through Internews, GlobalGiving donors are funding motorbikes for community activists, a scanner/copier/printer, and mobile phones, among other items. Through their actions, people like Aaron are making an enormous difference in the fight against the virus at a hyper-local level.

$3 Million and Counting for Locally Driven Ebola Solutions

At the end of 2014, we announced that we had helped raise more than $3 million for Ebola relief from donors in sixty-eight countries through the GlobalGiving community. We're currently crowdfunding for twenty-nine community organizations that are preventing and fighting the spread of the virus in West Africa. By giving to local nonprofits that are deeply rooted in the affected areas, donors are supporting organizations that were creating change in their own communities long before this Ebola outbreak — and will be there to drive the recovery of the region over the long term.

More than 3,800 individuals have given to over thirty Ebola relief projects on GlobalGiving.org and GlobalGiving.co.uk, including GlobalGiving's Ebola Epidemic Relief Fund. In November, a $200 donation to the fund came from a community of concerned people in Mozambique: "Though it may not seem like much, this is equivalent to two months minimum wage here. Thank you for connecting our hearts with fellow Africans who are suffering!" said Brian, the man whose family collected and sent the donations to GlobalGiving.

December 09, 2014

The current outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in West Africa is one of the great public health challenges of the still-young twenty-first century. In a few short months, Ebola has infected more than fifteen thousand people and claimed over fifty-five hundred lives, with the vast majority of fatalities in just three countries — Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.

Despite the toll Ebola has already taken and the broader threat it poses to populations everywhere, the global healthcare community has been painfully slow to respond. As of mid-November, International Medical Corps remained one of only a handful of foreign humanitarian relief organizations treating Ebola patients in the region.

To be sure, operating an Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) safely and effectively in rural West Africa is no easy task. Any organization taking on the challenge must be experienced in working in remote, difficult conditions. An arduous four-hour journey is required to reach our seventy-bed ETU located on the grounds of a former leprosy colony in Bong County, Liberia, a hundred and twenty miles north of Monrovia. We opened a similar-sized ETU in neighboring Margibi County at the end of November and expect to have a pair of fifty-bed ETUs operational in Sierra Leone by year's end.

Maintaining an ETU of that size requires three critical components: people, supplies, and money. While the majority of our staff are local Liberian nationals, it is a constant challenge to keep a sufficient and steady flow of skilled international medical and technical personnel willing to give up a two-month chunk of their lives to work in a potentially dangerous environment, then risk being ostracized — or even quarantined — upon returning home. To treat Ebola patients effectively, each ETU requires a staff of around two hundred and seventy. At present about 90 percent of the staff are Liberian nationals. We follow a medical staffing ratio of three expatriate and four local physicians, along with eight expatriate and twenty-four local nurses for every fifty patients. Additional staff are required to provide water, sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, and other needs. Ambulance crews pick up suspected cases to isolate them as quickly as possible, then return those who test negative for the virus or who have been successfully treated to their homes. Trained crews also disinfect, protect, and bury the remains of those who succumb to the disease.

November 08, 2014

Our (slightly abbreviated) weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the nonprofit sector....

Civil Society

Pooja Gupta, a writer at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, reviews the findings of a 2014 study published in Psychological Science which found that Americans' trust in each other and their institutions (the military excepted) has hit all-time lows in recent years. According to the authors of the study, "Trust in others and confidence in institutions [are] key indicators of social capital," but that kind of "capital"

was lower in recent years than during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s; the Iran hostage crisis and "national malaise" of the late 1970s and early 1980s; the height of the crime wave in the early 1990s; the Clinton impeachment of the late 1990s; the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; and the financial crisis and recession of the late 2000s....

Climate Change

Not that the new Congress will have any interest, but here are ten facts about climate change from the UN's new climate report that should give everyone pause.

Fundraising

The host of this month's Nonprofit Blog Carnival, fundraising consultant Pamela Grow, has issued a call for submissions. As has been the case for the past few years, this month's roundup is looking for submissions that detail how nonprofit organizations around the world are creating an "attitude of gratitude" (i.e., celebrate the donors who make their work possible). Here's how to submit:

Write a blog post, or choose a recent post that fits the theme.

Submit the post via email to: nonprofitcarnival@gmail.com – be sure to include your name, your blog's name and the URL of the post (not your blog homepage).

Get your post in by the end of day on Sunday, November 23. You can check back on Monday, November 24, to see if your post made the cut!

Global Health

The hysteria around Ebola in the U.S. may be fading, but the ignorance and misconceptions that fueled it in the first place are still very much with us, Angélique Kidjo, a singer and songwriter from Benin, reminds us in in an op-ed in the New York Times.

October 01, 2014

Two weeks ago, I was down with the flu AND jetlagged, so all I could manage to do in the evenings was get under a blanket and watch all fourteen hours of "The Roosevelts" on PBS. I thought it was riveting and the timing was perfect. It has been a particularly busy time for us at Foundation Center and there have been an inordinate amount of meetings and conferences around the annual meeting of the UN general assembly. Happily, most of the people sharing a table with me at these events had also been watching "The Roosevelts." We all admitted it was nice for once to discuss something else other than the grind during the lunches and coffee breaks!

The event brought together leaders from philanthropy, the UN, business, and civil society to talk about philanthropy and the role of the sector in the coming years. Brad Smith, president of Foundation Center, and Helena Monteiro from WINGS (Worldwide Initiative for Grantmaker Support) convened a session that focused on the data and knowledge needed to a) get a better grip on what we know and don’t know about funding for global development goals; b) how to get an accurate picture of development progress; c) how to build standards and trust so working together isn't so hard; d) how to climb the mountain of definitions when so many cultures (both organizational and geographic) name things differently; and e) how to remember that we are talking about people's lives here. It was noted during the session that ten years ago nobody would have wanted to attend a session on data!

June 13, 2014

There are certain moments in your life that you never forget. Some of mine include graduating from college, buying a home, and having a baby. The same thing happens in one's career, and for me, Wednesday was one of those moments.

For the past six years, InterAction has been using online maps to help tell our members’ story. Wednesday was important because we launched a new global map on InterAction's NGO Aid Map, one that will allow us to tell this story as it applies to all countries and all sectors.

As the world of development actors continues to grow and expand, it is more important than ever to make aid smarter. One way to help improve aid is through data sharing, but in the midst of a data revolution, how does one make sense of it all?

It may sound simple, but gathering up-to-date, standardized data from NGOs is no small feat, even for InterAction — an alliance made up of more than one hundred and eighty individual organizations working to advance human dignity and fight poverty around the world.

Collecting data is one thing, but ensuring that it stays relevant, useful, and accessible is a massive undertaking. That is why we built the NGO Aid Map, an online platform that demonstrates, using maps and other data visualizations, where our members work and what they do around the world. Through data, we can help determine whether we are on the right track to fighting poverty.

Now that you know why Wednesday mattered to me, I'd like to share five reasons why NGO Aid Map should matter to you: